Southern Comfort
by Fraulein Lotte
Summary: Circumstances beyond his control have found well-bred Master Tibenoch out in the far reaches of an expanding America. He prepares to make the best of things - or at least, to not make the worst of them.
1. Chapter 1: Scarlet O'Hara

Written for NaNoWriMo 2011, for mah own lovely Suh'th'n belle.

Per the (much appreciated) guidelines, this chapter has been edited for grammar and spelling, but...is still a NaNo. For wannabe-Twain-esque vernacular reasons, intentional misspellings/imaginary words in dialogue have been preserved.

**Warning:** This story contains ruthless amounts of cowboy references and is probably riddled with historical inaccuracies.

**Disclaimer:** Hanna is Not a Boy's Name and its characters belong to the amazing and talented Tessa Stone. I have merely borrowed them, dressed them up in silly costumes, and spent the month of November parading them around the prairie.

**Chapter One: Scarlet O'Hara**

It wasn't home.

Home was knee deep in greenery by this time of year the ground lush and full of life, pushing up against the carefully tended avenues that led to his home, somehow never quite spilling onto them. The trees would be heavy with cicadas, with honey-colored summer sunlight dripping from their leaves, and it would never be quiet. The world would vibrate through long days and into nights warm enough to swim in, even as the season began to lap up against its end, and meanwhile the fields would blossom into cauliflower-thick buds of white, aching for the fall and the harvest.

He could understand how they felt. His own heart was still amongst his luggage, yet to be delivered, and he could feel the pull of that distance.

The land around him now seemed so barren, full of parched yellow grass that made him think of winter, despite the late summer heat. He tried to imagine what those fields would look like the rest of the year, tried to tell himself that it had simply been ill timing. Nowhere could possibly persist in being this depressing. At least, he had to hope.

Previously, standing on his freshly whitewashed porch, he could have pointed out everything within view - the edges of his land were lost in gentle slopes and pretty treelines, so there had been nowhere visible from there that he had not explored. He owned no less land now a great deal more, in fact but this land was flat in all directions, fading out of sight against mountains the names of which he did not know, and there were probably not days enough in two lifetimes to get to know it all.

It was a large, empty, lonely sort of feeling.

"...Ah, well."

That was quite enough of that. There were more memories, of course, but not all of them were so pleasant. It was those less pleasant thoughts that had chased him far away from those pretty trees and those aching fields, out into the brown plains where no one knew him, and where even the unpainted wood of his new home faded into the landscape. So in the end there was nothing to do but make the best of it.

He stepped down from the porch and onto the dry ground, feeling the unusual hardness of it through the thin soles of his shoes. There was a great deal of dust in the air, and everything felt just a little bit dirty. He would, perhaps, have to reconsider his usual attire.

In the summer, when every effort had to be made to fend off the cloying heat, he preferred white. He was, at that moment, dressed in it from head to foot - the picture, he liked to think, of a respectable Southern gentleman. There were, after all, quite a lot of expectations back home, especially during this very social time of year, and disappointing those was...inconvenient, to say the least.

These things in mind, his suit was neatly tailored, a delicate linen affair that he could feel the prairie wind through, despite the shirt and vest beneath. This last - a subtly floral, cream-colored jacquard - was one of only two exceptions to his palette, the other being a neat black cross-tie held with a small silver pin. Even his cufflinks were lacquered to match - and he could sense those, too, picking up a thin film of Western dirt.

All the same, it was not the time to worry about that, either. He caught himself examining the already graying hem of his sleeve, and flicked it dismissively back to his side, starting off down the road ahead. There were no guests to receive, at least at present, and as far as he knew there was in general no one to impress. So he would just have to trust that even here, he would be able to find someone to do some adequate cleaning, and let things be for present. He was already dressed, and anxious to find something to do with himself, rather than stand on the porch trapped between an empty house and an empty landscape.

The pathway that led to the edges of his land was not the flat, paved avenue that twined beneath those remembered trees. It was smooth enough for feet or hooves but would probably present some problems for anything with wheels. It was not straight; it followed some imagined slope, or perhaps it wound around buildings that no longer existed, until it came to the long fence that bordered His and Theirs.

He watched the edge loom up as he made his way down the path, glancing this way and that occasionally, or trying to pick out the far-off buildings of his neighbors' homes. They were quite a ways out, but visible, if only in one direction. He could see them peppering the distance between himself and the mountains, surrounded by large tracks of long brown grass. This close, he could see that the grass was alive and well, just not the verdant green he was used to. It was a comforting thought, and he felt a bit better about things.

Of course it would have been ridiculous to attempt and walk the whole of his lands, especially without assistance and in this heat. But he would walk until he tired, and see what there was to see. It would give him some time to think.

He had a great deal to think about. The world had changed, and quite suddenly, and not in any way he had expected. His life had been a very constant thing - something he could be sure of, day to day. It had not necessarily been a life he had chosen, but it had been his, and he had enjoyed it.

Ples Tibenoch was the type of man who had been born into his life. Of course everyone was, in their way, but he would not imagine so completely. Most people made decisions, somewhere along the line. Even a man from a long line of carpenters was still just a carpenter, and if he decided to become a baker, the ripples that resulted would be small. Perhaps his father would be disappointed; perhaps his wife would berate him occasionally after dinner, but that was all.

It was different to inherit a title; it was different to inherit a home, a business, a staff. Especially if that staff, too, had been largely born and not hired into their work. You could not leave that so easily, not without changing a great deal more than you could ever plan for. And so from the moment of his birth - being a boy, and as it turned out, an only child - Ples had been groomed for his position, and advised of his responsibilities. From his birth, he had known what was expected of him, and while he had not always enjoyed it, he had generally performed very well.

And then -

Well, suffice to say that under very special circumstances, it _was_ possible for such a man to change professions. It had not been easy, nor pleasant, and he wondered not for the first time what would become of the people he had left behind. His mother had long since moved to a cold city, far North and in the opposite direction - a place it took a letter a week to get to so as of a few days before, there were no longer any Tibenochs in the house that had so long held their name.

He did not care to know whose house it would be now - he had left the sale and all the business of the estate in other hands. Or rather, whether he cared or not, he _did_ not know, and would not. There was no looking back, no checking in. There could not be, because correspondence required a return address, and that he would give to no one.

He shook the train of thought. He had problems of his own, and he had decided weeks before that there was nothing to be done about it.

He was entering an entirely new business, although it was still a business, and so he was convinced the basics remained the same. Strange to think he'd be relying on the whims of animals to bring in a profit, though. Plants seemed so much more docile, more predictable, and of course the same went for people, at least as compared to a _literal_ herd of cows. He was not entirely certain, despite all his reading, exactly what one did with them. By all accounts you simply did your best to keep others from making off with them, and for the most part just let them do as they would, and hoped that nature would take its course.

It was a very strange thought. Of course he himself had had little to do with the daily tending of his fields, but he had walked down those broad lanes, had watched those plants grow each year from sprout to full, leafy maturity, and he knew how to discern what he ought to have someone else do, if nothing else. And plants were, one had to hope, in exactly the same place from day to day, at least barring human interference. You could chart and count them, you could track their growth. How one could keep track of a mess of almost wild cattle, he had no idea.

It was going to make bookkeeping rather difficult.

Shaken again from his musings, he looked around. He had come quite a ways, he realized as he looked back. He could no longer make out where the pathway was amongst the grass - but then again that might just have happened more quickly than one might expect, in this flat, mostly unmarked land. Something would need to be done about that, too - if not foliage, then perhaps some posts, to show the line of the drive up to the house. Even in this sort of place, some things just would not do.

There were coming to be quite a lot of thoughts stacking up inside his mind, and he had neglected to bring anything to jot them down on. But he was faced with nothing but time, really; he could feel it ticking away into the emptiness, a void with no social obligations to speak of, not yet. Not even anyone to call upon, just now.

"More's the pity," he said to himself, pursing his lips. He ran a hand back through his hair, and he could feel the weight of the dust in it. It would be more than time for a bath when he went inside.

One step at a time.

Ordinarily he might have trailed his fingers along the fence as he walked, but this one was made of clawed wire - to keep the eventual animals in, he supposed, or perhaps to keep other things out. The thought made him a bit uneasy, and so - as he was beginning to feel the soil on his clothes anyway - he cut back across the broad fields towards the ranch house. He would need, soon, to collect a staff, although he had heard it was not as difficult to find one as to keep it - and for the first time in his life he might have to lock his doors against them.

For the moment there was only himself, but for all his fine breeding he could at least run a bath. They'd offered to send someone, but he had wanted to be alone, at least at first. Had to see, in fact, just how alone he could manage to be, because for all that the New World was spreading rapidly out towards the far coast he was not sure even that would be far enough, if -

- hot water.

Hot water and soap, and everything would be so very much improved. He shrugged out of his jacket and hung it neatly beside the door, easing that closed behind him and sliding the lock into place. It was already beginning to feel like a familiar action, although heretofore not one he'd often bothered with. Too many people had too many keys, back home. Now there was only one, at least to this door. He touched his hand briefly to the pocket of his slacks, feeling for the small, reassuring shape of that key. It was a new nervous habit, to match the way his other hand flickered so often towards the pocket of his vest, and its precious contents.

His shoes clicked down the hallway, and maybe he imagined the echo, but all the same the house felt just as empty as the land around it. It was much smaller than his previous home - after all, he intended to live mostly by himself - but the individual rooms felt larger. They were low-ceilinged and broad, full of straight lines and, at the moment, empty space. He would clutter them soon enough, he supposed. Things would start arriving as early as the next day - brand-new ordered furniture, none of it familiar, although all of it would be his. In name, anyway.

He wasn't sure if the tightness in his chest was anticipation or anxiety. Whatever the feelings, though, he had to remember that despite all appearance to the contrary -

This was, in fact, home.

At least for now.


	2. Chapter 2: Cuff and Buttons

**Chapter Two: Cuff and Buttons**

The city slept.

It was more of a town, if you had ever been east of the Appalachians, but Abner VanSlyk had never had so much as the inclination. He could have drawn you a map of that town, right down to the fence posts and sagebrush, and he could have named all the people who'd lived in each of the buildings - but he didn't know where Wyoming ended and wasn't sure what lay on the other side of that faraway line.

He was not the kind of person who looked far beyond his own borders – he failed to see the point. His work was here, around him, and he did not understand the need to know so much as the names of those faraway places, those cities he would never see.

The place where he had grown up, you hadn't needed more than a couple of hands to count up the inhabitants – so to his dark eyes Fairfield seemed a city, anyway. More than a city - it was _his_ city. Out here, people did not much bother with things like mayors, and if anyone remembered who the President was they were probably from out of town.

What they did need, though, was a sheriff. And so, each evening, before Abner and his partner turned in for the night, they circled their city's borders – staring out across the flat darkness of the plains to where they met the stars, and making sure there were no unwanted persons in between. The inhabitants of Fairfield knew better than to be out after dark, if they didn't want any trouble. Their sheriff was not a man to be taken lightly. Good thing, then, that there were not many places to go, outside the city limits - just a scattering of lonely ranch houses, and a mess of coyotes. And by now, even the coyotes knew to stay out of the way.

The sheriff shaded his eyes against the moonlight, letting his eyes adjust to the shadows. An errant breeze, ill-informed of the season, chased a bit of tumbleweed across the night-gray vista before washing up cool against his face, and the face of the sleeping town behind him.

A long time ago, Abner's ancestors had come from somewhere else - somewhere cold and dark and full of snow. They had been made for their backdrop, pale colors to match the landscape, sturdily built just like their homes to withstand the weather. All that was left of that now was an extra capital letter, the strong straight bridge of his nose, and the kind of possessive ownership that comes from hanging by your nails to survival. When you lived in those cold places, there was no leaving for somewhere else. Home was home - the only home. And so it was worth defending to the last.

So the law-abiding citizens of Fairfield - who, likely, could also be counted up on a pair of hands - could sleep a little more soundly than most of their neighbors. The prairie didn't get so cold, but it was no less empty than those faraway fields of snow, and if you were run out of this town there were about the same number of places to go.

Abner himself had only barely seen snow, and never known it to carpet the ground. He was American, not from anywhere because he was from everywhere, with a slightly dark complexion that spoke of the indiscretions of his forefathers and brilliantly copper hair that had no memory of the pale people from whom he'd inherited his name.

Lost, too, was that sturdy build - If Abner had been anyone else he might have been quite thin. His work, though, had filled in his slender frame, and his posture had nudged his height just above average. So although he was neither tall nor broad, he did not look in any way like a person you wanted to cross. He wore a neatly fitted black suit, a black hat and a badge, and he spoke about as much as a shadow.

His partner looked, perhaps, a bit more approachable. But then again, his partner was a horse.

Paradox was a cream-colored stallion most people might have called a palamino, only like his partner he was no one thing. Somewhere along the line something had patched his coat with black, although not quite enough to count as pinto.

Of course, he and Abner cared about this in equal amounts – which was to say not in the slightest. He was a strong, reliable horse, never spooked, and cared just as much about their work as his human counterpart.

He was also remarkably spoiled, but that was not anything anyone would say within earshot of Sheriff VanSlyk. He was not a vengeful man, but he was an old-fashioned one in his way, and he would not abide that sort of slander.

Paradox brought them around to where they'd started, satisfied for the evening, and Abner concurred. They lingered there for just a moment, by the gates that ostensibly marked the entrance to the town – staring down the main road for no particular reason – at least, not one either could have named.

The land was quiet and smelled like summer. This time of year, the sunlight sank into the ground and the grass, leaving it warm and smelling like midday even long after dark. It was a good, rich smell, the land baked like fresh bread under that blazing sun - now that they were out of the oven for the day, a person could appreciate the lingering heat and the scent. Or so Abner felt, anyway. But he loved his home, he was that type, with a fierce loyalty to the few things to which he attached the sum of his value.

They headed back into the town, which at this time of night was almost as dark as the land outside. Abner could have named for you the windows to whom the few lights belonged, and could have done it without looking, because they were almost always the same. He glanced around just to be sure, of course, as Paradox took them home.

He and Paradox both lived in what effectively passed for police station, court and jail - Abner in a loft above his office, largely because if there ever were an overnight prisoner there were no other guards - and Paradox in a slanted sort of stable attached to the back side. This was an addition Abner had built himself, some years ago – for both practical and personal reasons it wouldn't do for his partner to be more than a room away.

It was nothing to be too proud of, and Abner was not the type to revel in his own accomplishments. It was a simple thing, exactly big enough for what it was for, made of rough planks salvaged from old buildings, and the most complicated thing about it was probably the hinges on the door. But it served; it kept the weather out and the heat in, and there were places for food and water and tools.

It was to that little room that they headed now, Abner dismounting as easily as most people could stand up from a chair. His feet on the ground he began to strip saddle, blanket and bridle from his partner. The bridle was mostly for appearances - Abner did almost all of his steering with his knees or his voice, and even that was rare, as Paradox generally had as much idea where Abner wanted to go as Abner himself did, and almost as much part in making those decisions.

As always, when it came free Paradox smacked his lips a bit, and made the sort of horse face that probably translated to rolling his eyes. Abner made the sort of human face that translated to tapping a forefoot, and they both agreed as always that there was nothing for it, because there were just certain things civilized people were expected to do - and they were both civilized people. More or less.

Equipment set aside, Abner felt around for flint and kindle. That first he could do in the dark - could have done with his eyes closed, if the need had ever somehow arisen - but the step following he needed light for. So he struck the flint and nursed a small lantern to life, making his one of the few lighted windows in the town. Finished, he removed his gloves, setting them on the workbench beside him and taking a moment to flex his freed fingers, stretching joints left stiff from the day's work.

He took up the currying comb, tapping the stiff bristles first against the palm of his hand because some time long ago someone had advised him to, and while he had forgotten the reason he'd kept the habit. Setting his free hand against Paradox's flank, feeling the warmth and life of him underneath his fingers, he began to make quick circles down Paradox's long neck with the brush. The muscles under Abner's hand shifted as Paradox shook his head, settling in under his partner's touch.

It always felt nice just to do that; just to touch his partner and know that he was there. It was different during the day, although he did it often - different because he almost always wore gloves, then, and usually had so many other things on his mind. In these moments there were only the two of them, and nothing to think about but that.

There was a task to complete, though, so Abner continued about it.

"We have a bit to do tomorrow, Para," he commented quietly as he worked, moving down Paradox's side, checking carefully for burrs and dirt and anything else that might cause them trouble. This was the longest conversation in Abner's day, the time when he sorted through his thoughts, tidying them as he tidied his friend - unwinding the mess so that when he went inside and washed himself up, he'd be ready to sleep. "There's a new tenant in the old Thompson house, for one. Better to see to that sooner than later."

Paradox snorted and shifted, tapping his forefeet in response as Abner went on, detailing their tasks. His voice was mostly just noise to both of them, because their days weren't so different and mostly it was just talk. Sometimes Abner even wondered if it wasn't just to stay in practice. He didn't talk to many people, if he could help it. Easier by far to talk to Paradox, who shared more of his days with him anyway. Easier to talk to someone he knew understood, even if there wasn't much in the way of response.

He came carefully around to Paradox's other side, passing far too closely to those hind legs for most people's comfort. But if Paradox ever did kick Abner, the most damage would be done to the sheriff's feelings. He trailed his fingers over Paradox's coat as he went, just letting his partner know where he was, since he couldn't see him. He worked in silence now, out of his small collection of things to say, that list of tasks he repeated like a song as he worked. It never quite lasted all the way around, and so for a few moments, he simply went about his task, brushing Paradox's coat until it glistened in the lamplight and they were both ready to turn in.

A few more steps, a few more minutes - wide-toothed comb for mane and tail, and a little water to cool him down - and then Abner laid a hand gently on Paradox's neck, and his partner turned his head, offering his nose for Abner's other hand, which was their goodnight.

Abner's own grooming took much less time, but then, most of the dirt on him was taken off with his clothes, and his hat kept the bulk of the burrs and such from his hair. He hung up his suit, hitting it a few times to knock off the worst of the dust. It was one of only three, so it had to stand a few wears before it could be washed. His hat he laid on the bedside table, after picking a few stray bits of twig out of the band.

Next he washed himself up at the basin beside his narrow bed, quickly but thoroughly, and sat down at the table in the old pants and thin undershirt that served as summer pajamas. There was one last thing to care for, and that was his gun. He cleaned it twice daily - once in the morning, and again at night - taking it apart to all its component bits and checking each before putting it back together again.

He had no faith in second chances, and in a gunfight there was not time for that trigger to fail. He had had people remark that it looked like he had never used his gun, which to many might have been a slight, but to Abner was something of a compliment. He kept very few things, and so he kept them in very good condition.

By now this last took him a scant few minutes, and only so much of his attention as washing his face. He reassembled it quickly, placing it carefully back in its worn leather holster, which was hung on the post at the head of his bed. He shook out his blankets, because you could never be too careful with what might be hiding places, this time of year, and lay down on the straw mattress – it was just old enough to be comfortable, long use having finally worn all of the sharp bits into submission.

Having already run through the following day, there was not a lot to think about as he stared up at the low slope of the ceiling. His fingers trailed absently over the wood where he could reach – there was a small patch just to the side of him that had been worn smooth by his fussing over the years he had lived there.

How many had it been? He wasn't entirely certain. He had come here so long ago, had seen a need and filled it, and from there the days had begun to run into each other until he forgot that some people counted them. He could feel himself getting older, though. He did not remember feeling tired, before. But today, he was tired, and so it was not long before his eyelids were heavy, and before his attention wandered enough that they could slide closed over those dark eyes, and let him follow the rest of his town into sleep.


End file.
